Today I’m releasing my award-winning short documentary Pvt. Ravel’s Bolero for free viewing online. The link is below. Laurels from around the world in a 10 second video.
What follows is taken from Chapter 1 (“Act I”) of my upcoming film companion book...
Act I — When the Audience Fell Silent
I didn’t expect the silence.
After twenty-eight minutes of trench fog, broken bodies, scorched earth, and the relentless, rising heartbeat of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, I expected applause. Or at least I hoped for it. And yes, I did get it.
But when the last credits faded and something new appeared, the applause dissolved into something I had not anticipated.
As the screen began its slow, unbroken list of every war humankind has ever waged, the audience at the West Sound Film Festival in Bremerton, Washington, sat motionless. They breathed the same cold, heavy air I had lived in for six months while editing the film.
I took a brief look around. People seemed suspended between shock and anticipation, as if unsure what was coming next, or whether they wanted to know. A long roll of wars began and scrolled on, and on, and on, seemingly endlessly until, finally it stopped.
Silence.
Only then did I truly understand what I had made. I wondered whether audiences everywhere reacted the same way. I have to assume they did. After all, I had designed the film to land that way, even if I hadn’t fully grasped the scope and weight of its impact until that moment.
Why no applause? I think some wanted to but felt it would be inappropriate. Others were simply stunned, maybe a little numb from realizing just how many wars there have been on Earth. To be sure, every time I watch that scroll myself, it still surprises me. And I am the one who assembled it.
Pvt. Ravel’s Bolero began as a poem—just a private imagining about a composer and a battlefield. But somewhere between the forgotten photographs, the crackling public-domain newsreels, and the long nights repairing a century’s worth of scratches and dust, the project transformed. The film became something I hadn’t fully seen until that moment in the dark:
An antiwar lament for a world that keeps repeating its own worst mistakes.
And that silence told me that the audience had understood it, too. This was not a premiere. It was closer to the end of the film's run, worldwide. I couldn't help but wonder how other audiences had reacted to what they had experienced, especially in Moscow after invading Ukraine, twice in eight years. Especially in Ukraine, when it played their.
This book exists because of that silence—because something happened in the theater that night that went beyond a short film’s festival run. Viewers didn’t just watch a documentary. They experienced a collision: between beauty and brutality, between the aspirations of a composer who served at Verdun and the colossal machinery of industrialized death that surrounded him, between myth and memory, art and atrocity. The beginning of mechanized, modern warfare, with humanity's first ever air battles.
This companion book is an anatomy of that collision.
It tells the story of how a filmic poem—built from public-domain remnants, historical fragments, and the music of a wounded genius—came together one pixel, one scratch, one footstep in the mud at a time. Ravel was never wounded in combat, but months of exhaustion, illness, and physical collapse eventually forced his discharge.
It explains how a composer who wanted to fly airplanes ended up driving munitions trucks through hell.
It offers the historical scaffolding behind each artistic choice, from the trench slang flashing too fast to read, to the blurred photos intentionally left imperfect, to the relentless structure echoing Bolero’s inescapable escalation.
It explores not only the Great War, but the way war keeps returning; not only Ravel’s story, but the stories of soldiers whose blurred faces were never meant to disappear, born into a world innocent of the destruction that would soon be engineered around them.
And finally, it is a book about filmmaking when all you have is grit, imagination, and a determination to resurrect voices history forgot.
Pvt. Ravel’s Bolero has now won more than eighty awards on the international festival circuit, as a film that began with a single question:
What if Ravel had written Bolero in the trenches?
The answer turned out to be far larger—historically, artistically, emotionally—than the question.
This book is that answer.
The Vinyl I Had to Have
When the question of music licensing first surfaced, I found myself staring down a wall I had never expected to encounter. The film was already complete, edited precisely to the contours of Maurice Ravel’s own conducting of Boléro. Changing the music would have meant unmaking the film I had just spent half a year shaping, and years researching (because of my original poem). I couldn’t replace the performance — not emotionally, not historically, and certainly not artistically.
And it had to be the first performance with Ravel conducting.
Eventually, I found a copy — a very nice 1930s Polydor pressing of Ravel conducting the Orchestre Lamoureux. It wasn’t pristine sounding like the version I used in my film. It wasn’t the definitive archival transfer. But it was real. It had lived a life. It carried every pop, crackle, and hiss of a physical groove shaped nearly a century earlier by the needle of a long-gone turntable.
I bought it.
When it arrived, I digitized it myself. Not because it sounded better than the remastered versions available online — it didn’t. But because it felt like a direct line back to that moment in 1930 when Ravel stood before the orchestra, lifted his baton, and carved Boléro into the grooves of a lacquer disc for the first time. My rip had flaws, surface noise, and a kind of dusty breath that no remaster would ever preserve.
Yet there was something undeniably authentic about it.
That version became my “alternate” cut of the film — a version whose sonic imperfections gave it an antique, museum-like presence, as though you were hearing the piece the way audiences might have heard it in a Paris salon in the 1930s: imperfect, alive, and unpolished. I made a new version of the film with this recording and then, watched the film. It gave it an ambiance that made me question using the clean sounding version.
After all, I had used questionable photos and video at times in the film for poetic reasoning. War is ugly, dirty, confusing...obfuscated. So why shouldn't the media be? It's a forever question in the realm of documentary filmmaking. Traditionally you use the very best perfect examples you can fine. But in a filmic poem film, DO YOU? It was a battle I had to go through over and over again while building the original first draft of the film during editing. In the end, I decided to keep both films, but present the clean sounding music version, foremost.
In the end, it wasn’t a solution to the licensing question.
But it was an act of homage.
A way to maintain the integrity of the film’s soul, even in the face of legal and practical obstacles.
And, unexpectedly, it became its own artistic statement — a reminder that history isn’t always clean, quiet, or convenient. Sometimes it crackles. Sometimes it hisses. Sometimes it carries the scars of the years it survived.
Just like war.
Just like memory.
Just like art.
I will always wonder however, which version I should have used out in the world. Well? I will always have that other version with the performance I ripped myself off original vinyl, should I ever need it. Or should anyone want to experience it.
⭐ WATCH THE FILM
“Pvt. Ravel’s Bolero”
A short filmic
poem and WWI historical documentary
Directed by JZ Murdock
Readers are invited to watch the film that inspired and accompanies this book. You may view it at the link below, or the QR code on the next page:
This version is the 2025 digital remaster of the 2022 film, preserving the film as it was presented during its international festival run, including the historical materials, audio, and pacing that shaped its original form.
Watching the film before or after reading offers different insights. Before reading, it provides an emotional foundation. After reading, it deepens the context, revealing layers that may not be immediately visible on a first viewing.
Thank you for taking the time to explore both the film and the story behind it.
From LgN Productions.
You can alternatively scan the QR code below to access the film.
Optional “Additional Film Version” Section
For those interested in viewing how the film evolved, the earlier version remains available online.
To view the alternate version with the LgN Productions'
Polydor vinyl transfer of the 1930 Bolero
performance:
https://youtu.be/moK5_7xK04g
This earlier version is not as pristine as it carries the pops, crackle, and hiss of the old vinyl surface. Although it was created during the attempt to address licensing issues with the cleaner digital recording, the more antiquated sound took on an unexpected character of its own, as I explain above.
The imperfections add a kind of charm and realism, an audible presence that feels closer to how the piece might have sounded in a room, on a phonograph, or in its own era. The result is a version of the film that feels slightly more historic, a little more weathered, and in some ways more human.
I still have the very first cut of the film—the version that won most of the festivals and used the clean-sounding performance of Boléro. But that early version is now retired to my archives. The new remastered release incorporates several adjustments and refinements I wish I had made from the beginning, so this updated version will remain the primary one I share with the public.
For my Substack on this (a smaller post).
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
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